From Sorrow to Joy

This past week, the community came together to commemorate the Shoah, that horrendous period in Jewish history when 6 million of our people were murdered only because they were Jewish. No one asked if they were Orthodox, Reform, Secular or totally assimilated. It did not matter how they defined themselves or how other Jews defined them; in the eyes of the Nazis, they were all the same.

At last Wednesday's program, we heard from Thea Aschkenase, who survived the Holocaust. We also heard from Jacob Maril one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, whose story of persecution and harrowing escape reinforced our fears that genocide and murder are only too frequently occurring phenomena even today.

Their stories also brought to mind several other periods in the not too distant past of the Jewish people.

Thea's heroic story continued with her attempts to reach Israel, then known as Palestine which was under the mandate of the British. After several attempts that were foiled by the British, she made it to Palestine and began her new life there.

Jacob's walk from Sudan to Ethiopia reminded me of the thousands of Jews who walked from Ethiopia through the deserts in their attempts to reach Eretz Yisrael, their holy land as depicted in the Bible. Just as many of Jacob's compatriots lost their lives through brutal attacks, hunger and thirst, so did many Ethiopian Jews.

The one striking difference between Jacob's journey and the one taken by thousands of Ethiopian Jews was that they had a destination in mind: the destination was the Land of Israel, their ancestral home and center of their hopes and dreams for millenia.

So too did Thea's desire to go to Israel come from her desire to live in a Jewish state where fear of persecution and hatred would be forever a thing of the past. Only when Israel became a state in 1948, did that dream come true.

This week we mark the 64th Anniversay of the founding of the State of Israel. Whatever one's political view of Israel is today, we can only imagine what Jewish life today would be without an Israel-a homeland for the persecuted among us, a safe haven for Holocaust survivors, a new home for a lost segment of our people, our Ethiopian family, the free and open society that welcomed over a million Soviet Jews after the Iron Curtain fell.

This melting pot of Jews is continuing to create and shape our Jewish present and future. Israel cares about its Jewish family outside of Israel just as much as I hope we care about it. It partners with us in improving Jewish education, in offering Birthright Israel trips and in helping to develop Jewish culture in all its many forms.

Let us all be proud of Israel's many accomplishments in its very short existence of only 64 years..and let us all celebrate our relationship with Israel by attending at least one of the many community Israel celebrations over the next few weeks.

Yom Huledet Sameach, Eretz Yisrael! Happy Birthday Israel!